This week in HaitiHaïti Progrès
August 23 - 29, 2000
The Haitian Revolution Revisited
Selections from "The Black Jacobins"(The second of three parts)
We continue this week with extracts from C.L.R. James' "The Black Jacobins," the monumental account of the Haitian revolution. Last week, our selected passages detailed how the slaves of the French colony of Saint Domingue (called San Domingo by James) lived. This week, we continue with a portrait of the French colonists from the chapter entitled "The Owners."
Of the three, San Domingo planters, British bourgeoisie, and French bourgeoisie, the first and most important were the planters of San Domingo.On such a soil as San Domingo slavery, only a vicious society would flourish. Nor were the incidental circumstances such as to mitigate the demoralization inherent in such a method of production.
San Domingo is an island of mountain ranges rising in places to 6,000 feet above sea-level. From these flow innumerable streams coalescing into rivers which water the valleys and not inconsiderable plains lying between the hills. Its distance from the equator gives an unusual lusciousness and variety to the natural exuberance of the tropics, and the artificial vegetation was not inferior to the natural. Field upon field, the light green sugar-cane, low and continually rippled in the breeze, enclosed the factory and the dwelling houses like a sea; a few feet above the cane-stalks waved the five-foot leaves of the banana-trees; near the dwelling-houses, the branches of the palm, crowning a perfectly rounded and leafless column of 60 or 70 feet, gave forth, like huge feathers, a continuous soothing murmur; while groups of them in the distance, always visible in the unclouded tropical air, looked like clusters of giant umbrellas waiting for the parched and sun-baked traveller.
In the season, mango and orange trees, solitary or in groves, were a mass of green leaves and red or golden fruit. Thousands of small, scrupulously tidy coffee-trees rose on the slopes of the hills, and the abrupt and precipitous mountain-sides were covered to the summits with the luxuriant tropical undergrowth and precious hardwood forests of San Domingo. The traveller from Europe was enchanted at his first glimpse of this paradise, in which the ordered beauty of agriculture and the prodigality of Nature competed equally for his surprise and admiration.
But it was monotonous. Year in year out, day after day, it was the same, a little greener in the wet season, a little browner in the dry. The wilder scenery was constantly magnificent, but in the colonist who had seen the same domestic landscape from his earliest hour, it awakened little response. To the emigrant who was at first charmed and exhilarated, monotony bred indifference, which could develop into active dislike, and longing for the seasons returning with the year.
The climate was harsh, and for the Europeans of the eighteenth century, without modern knowledge of tropical hygiene, almost intolerable. The burning sun and humid atmosphere took a heavy toll on all newcomers, European and African alike. The African died, but the European ailments were dreaded by the planters whose knowledge and habits were powerless to combat them. Fever and dysentery in the hot season; cold, rheumatism, nasal catarrhs and diarrhoea in the wet; at all times a disinclination for sustained labor, fostered by the gluttony and lasciviousness bred by abundance and scores of slaves waiting to perform any duty, from pulling off shoes to spending the night.
Indulgence had the white colonial in its grip from childhood. "I want an egg", said a colonial child. "There are none". "Then I want two". This notorious anecdote was characteristic. To the unhealthiness of the climate and the indulgence of every wish were added the open licentiousness and habitual ferocity of his parents, the degradation of human life which surrounded the child on every side.
The ignorance inherent in rural life prior to the industrial revolution was reinforced by the irascibility and the conceit of isolation allied to undisputed domination over hundreds of human beings. The plantations were often miles apart and, in those days of horse-traffic and few or bad roads in a mountainous country, communication with neighbors was difficult and rare. The planters hated the life and sought only to make enough money to retire to France or at least spend a few months in Paris, luxuriating in the amenities of civilization. With so much to eat and drink, there was a lavish hospitality which has remained a tradition, but the majority of the great houses, contrary to the legend, were poorly furnished, and their owner looked on them as rest-houses in the intervals of trips to Paris. Seeking to overcome their abundant leisure and boredom with food, drink, dice and black women, they had long before 1789 lost the simplicity of life and rude energy of those nameless men who laid the foundation of the colony. A manager and an overseer, and the more intelligent of their slaves, were more than sufficient to run their plantations. As soon as they could afford it, they left the island, if possible never to return, though they never formed in France so rich and powerful a social and political force as the West Indian interest in England.
The women were subjected to the same evil influences. In the early years of the colony they had been imported like slaves and machinery. Most of the first arrivals were the sweepings of the Paris gutter, bringing to the island "bodies as corrupt as their manners and serving only to infect the colony." (De Vaissière, pp. 77-79). Another official, asking for women, begged the authorities not to send the "ugliest they could find in the hospitals." As late as 1743, official San Domingo was complaining that France still sent girls whose "aptitude for generation was for the most part destroyed by too great usage." Projects for some educational system never came to fruition. With increasing wealth the daughters of the richer planters went to Paris where, after a year or two at a finishing-school, they made distinguished matches with the impoverished French nobility. But in the colony they passed their time attiring themselves, singing stupid songs, and listening to the gossip and adulation of their slave attendants. Passion was their chief occupation, stimulated by the over-feeding, idleness, and an undying jealousy of the black and mulatto women who competed so successfully for the favours of theirs husbands and lovers.
To the men of diverse races, classes and types who formed the early population of San Domingo had been added as the years passed a more unified and cohesive element, the offshoots of the French aristocracy. Deprived of political power by Richelieu and converted by Louis XIV into a decorative and administrative appendage of the absolute monarchy, the younger sons of French noblemen found in San Domingo some opportunity to rebuild their shattered fortunes and live the life of the country magnate now denied them in France. They came as officers of the army and officials, and stayed to found fortunes and families. They commanded the militia, administered a rude justice. Arrogant and spendthrift, yet they were a valuable section of white San Domingo society and knit together more firmly a society composed of such diverse and disintegrating elements. But even their education, traditions, and pride were not proof against the prevailing corruption, and one could see a "relation of the de Vaudreils, a Châteauneuf, or Boucicault, last descendant of the famous marshal of France, passing his life between a bowl of rum and a Negro concubine." (De Vaissière, pp. 217) (...)
Such culture as there was centered in [the] towns. In Le Cap, there were various masonic and other societies, the most famous of which was the Philadelphia Circle, a body devoting itself to politics, philosophy and literature. But the chief reading of the population consisted of lascivious novels. For amusement there were theatres, not only in Le Cap and Port-au-Prince, but in such small towns as Léogane and St. Marc, where the melodramas and the thrillers of the day were played to packed houses. In 1787 there were three companies in Port-au-Prince alone.
What the towns lacked in intellectual fare, they made up for in opportunities of debauchery - gambling-dens (for everyone in San Domingo played and great fortunes were won and lost in a few days), dance-halls, and private brothels whereby the mulatto women lived in such comfort and luxury that in 1789, of 7,000 mulatto women in San Domingo, 5,000 were either prostitutes or the kept mistresses of white men. (...)
In the towns the great merchants and the wealthy agents of the maritime bourgeoisie were included with the planters as big whites. On the plantations the managers and the stewards were either agents of the absentee owner, or were under the eye of the planter himself and, therefore, subordinate to him. This in the country, and in the towns the small lawyers, the notaries, the clerks, the artisans, the grocers, were known as the small whites. Included among the small whites was a crowd of city vagabonds, fugitives from justice, escaped galley slaves, debtors unable to pay their bills, adventurers seeking adventure or quick fortunes, men of all crimes and all nationalities. From the underworld of two continents they came, Frenchmen and Spaniards, Maltese, Italians, Portuguese and Americans. For whatever a man's origin, record or character, here his white skin made him a person of quality and rejected or failures in their own country flocked to San Domingo, where consideration was achieved at so cheap a price, money flowed and opportunities of debauchery abounded.
No small white was a servant, no white man did any work that he could get a Negro to do for him. A barber summoned to attend to a customer appeared in silk attire, hat under his arm, sword at his side, cane under his elbow, followed by four Negroes. One of them combed the hair, another dressed it, a third curled it, and the fourth finished. While they worked the employer presided over the various operations. At the slightest slackness, at the slightest mistake, he boxed the cheek of the unfortunate slave so hard that often he knocked him over. The slave picked himself up without any sign of resentment, and resumed. The same hand which had knocked over the slave closed on an enormous fee, and the barber took his exit with the same insolence and elegance as before.
This was the type for whom race prejudice was more important than even the possession of slaves, of which they held few. The distinction between a white man and a man of color was for them fundamental. It was their all. In defense of it, they would bring down the whole of their world.
(Next week, "The San Domingo Masses Begin")